You've never had the reaction of "what on Earth is this crap doing?" And looked at the tool and been like "omg what kind of flunkie wrote this" and then end up forking the project, doing negative coding, fixing the issues, and then having to address the issues threads on GitHub yourself because the "maintainer" stopped responding a year ago?

I mean it's just a huge waste of time. These modern stacks (mostly js) are crap code all the way down.

It's made me want to return to Perl because honestly, it has everything and is somehow mostly idiot free. I probably should...

I have never had that reaction because frankly, I don't think it's appropriate to call people who know less than I do 'flunkies'. Sometimes, I like to approach the situation with humility and ask questions. Other times, I quietly ignore the situation. And other times, if it's a particularly egregious error, I'll write code and explain why I think it is better. But I never call someone a flunkie because words and attitudes like that are incredibly rude and toxic.

The moment you convey that sort of attitude, two things happen. The person you called a flunkie will not learn a goddamned thing from you. And, if they happen to be right, you won't learn a damned thing either. Great choices.

Using failure as infrastructure at a fast paced startups with shoestring budgets and then taking the resources to afford the luxury of a nurturing and caring mentorship for every teenager with a computer is a disaster.

That is true.

However, you can pursue a culture of excellence without being rude and toxic. You can be kind and humble without coddling.

Edit - I should have added that if teenagers with computers have a good attitude, feel engaged and feel cared about, they can be extremely productive members of a team. And they have a tendency to grow into really amazing engineers (and fine people).

Hmm, I'm sorry... I'm having trouble understanding your point, and specifically how it relates to my comment.

I parsed it wrong. I thought you essentially said "the things I build are definitely worse then relying on a collection of random internet dudes code through npm." But yes, GNU make, emacs, yacc, lex, bison, ar, nm, there's lots of great tools.

It's 4am, I should sleep.

Oh, haha no worries - sleep well :)